LAUSR

A novel time-domain (TD) migration method in inhomogeneous media is proposed. The formulation is based on the phase-space pulsed beam summation (PS-PBS) method. We use pulsed beams (PBs) to transform the acquired seismic data and backpropagate the PBs’ data. The PBs’ data are represented along a spatial, spectral, and temporal phase-space lattice. Under the Born approximation, the data are given as the local interaction between pairs of PBs and subsurface layers. This relation is denoted as a local Snell’s law reflection from a localized region over the subsurface. Due to the spectral–temporal PBs’ localization properties, only a few temporal data points correspond to each imaging point. The PBs’ data provide an a priori sparse skeleton as the basis for the migration problem, which reduces the number of calculations needed to form images.